contrapuntal (adj.), “foolishly advocating passing instead of kicking on fourth down” (Alfred Greenberg).
hermit (n.), “girl’s baseball glove” (Judith Werben).
saturnine (n.), “baseball team that plays on weekends” (Ed Grimm).
truncate (n.), “tailgate party given by compact-car owner” (anonymous).
wrinkle (n.), “a small hockey arena” (Robert Forbes).
haiku (n.), “signal to center from Japanese quarterback” (Tony Wight).
Enjoy the game. Hope a nail-biter is in the works.Haiku!
Redefinitions IV. There’s no stopping wordplay. Coiners of these redefinitions get nothing but eternal life in the data bank.
altruism (n.), “the tendency to believe everything you hear” (Gary Parnell).
condescending (n.), “a prisoner going down a flight of stairs,” and liability (n.), “the capacity for prevarication” (Ed Grimm).
madras (n.), “an Indian sleeping mat” (Robert Forbes).
equinox (n.), “a cross between a mare and a bull,” and apology (n.), “the study of primates” (Robert and Mary Rubalsky).
cantaloupe (n.), “parental nonconsent” (Joan Jaquish).
destabilize (v.), “let the horses out of the barn” (anonymous).
precursor (n.), “a profane tot” (Leon Freilich).
Regime Changes. Secretary of State Colin Powell laid it on the rhetorical line: the Bush administration “is committed to regime change” in Iraq. He repeated to the Senate that “a regime change would be in the best interests of the region.” That’s a euphemism for “overthrow of government” or “toppling Saddam.”
Why, then, did he not say “we intend to throw him and his motley crew of mass murderers out of Baghdad, replacing them with a government that will allow the Iraqi people free elections”? Because that sort of talk is undiplomatic or even impolitic. Overthrow and topple are hot, vigorous verbs; regime change is a cool, polite noun phrase suggesting transition without collateral damage.
A regime is a government you don’t like. (It can also be a strict diet of grapefruit and pasta, which you don’t like either, but that’s a different sense.) The old regime is always pejorative, coming from the French revolutionaries’ gleeful derogation of the government of the last Bourbon kings as l’ancien régime. The word’s coloration is negative; no politician seeking a “fresh start” or a “clean sweep” goes on to call for a new regime.
“If the case for regime change is clear,” writes Michael Eisenstadt in the National Interest, “the way forward is not. The debate in Washington about regime change in Iraq has become highly partisan.” (The title of his article is “Curtains for the Baath,” a play on the name of Saddam’s Baath political party; this suggests further headlines like “Going to the Mat with Baath,” “Baath Throws in Towel,” etc.)
Where did this euphemism begin? The earliest citation I can find in the Nexis data bank is in a 1980 Associated Press story predicting “risk to business from regime change.” After kicking around in foreign-policy journals for a decade, it was picked up by Daily Variety in Hollywood, as it followed “the regime change at MCA Music.” Diplolingo is now wresting the phrase back from the general usage.
Another military euphemism, collateral damage, was used above. This was not a subliminal plug for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest movie epic of vigilante revenge. It was an introduction to a phrase used in restrained apology for casualties among civilians or to destruction of other than military targets. It was also used by the mass murderer Timothy McVeigh—“there’s always collateral damage”—in dismissing contrition for the children his truck bomb killed in Oklahoma City.
The adjective collateral, “parallel,” came to mean “ancillary, subordinate”; as a noun, it is a pledge of security alongside a debt to ensure payment. The essential meaning is now “on the side of.” Where the adjective is used to modify damage, the meaning becomes “unintended, inadvertent.” It is in the same league of hesitant regret as friendly fire.
The phrasedick Fred Shapiro at Yale tracked it back in its current sense to a 1961 usage by Thomas Schelling in Operations Research magazine: “Measures to locate and design our strategic forces so as to minimize collateral damage.” Reached at the University of Maryland, where he is now a distinguished professor, Schelling says, “I used it because it seemed to be the common terminology.” He disclaims coinage of that and of counter-force and second strike, also often attributed to him; such modesty is rare. (When I coin something, I make sure all the nattering nabobs of negativism know it.)
In running the traps with Shapiro’s help at the American Dialect Society, I get word from John Baker that collateral damage was used in a British court in 1820. It had been cooking along quietly in legal usage until the 1990s, when it exploded into military parlance.
Retraction. In Gore’s historic Second Telephone Call, Bush (snippily or not) asked if he intended to retract his concession. This was often reported as “called to rescind his concession.” Any difference?
Retract, from the Latin trahere, “to draw,” means “to take back; to with-draw.” It is most often used now in connection with correcting misstatements and avoiding libel suits.
Rescind’s root is scindere, “to split, divide,” and means “to revoke, annul, cancel, expunge, abrogate.” It has more of a legal connotation than retract.
Because a political concession is a gracious accommodation rather than a legal surrender of rights, the use of retract in this case was correct.
Riff and Raffish. “POTUS Speaks” is the title of one of the early freshets in what will become a torrent of inside-the-Clinton-White-House memoirs. The acronym Potus (in newspaper style, capitalized and lowercase because it is longer than four letters) stands for the office to be occupied by the man we elected a couple of weeks ago.
I was present, if not at the birth of the acronym, then at least when the spoken word was in its infancy. As a new White House speechwriter in 1969, I noticed the letters on one of the labels next to the five buttons on a telephone extension in the Cabinet Room and wondered aloud, “Who’s this guy Potus?” A member of the White House Communications Agency (we pronounced WHCA “Whacka”) explained that since the Johnson administration, the phone line from the Oval Office was marked with the initials for “President of the United States.”
It stood to reason: A stark Nixon might have seemed presumptuous, and there wasn’t enough space on the label for President. An abbreviation like Pres. or Prsd’t would have looked funny; Prez was too jazzy and Prexy overly informal. Hence Potus, sported proudly on the telephone of all close-in White House aides. I left in 1973 and turned out a novel a few years later about a blinded chief executive; a problem was, what should the bachelor president’s love interest call him? A first name would seem presumptuous and “Mr. President” unromantic. Solution: Potus, which was suitably irreverent without being awkwardly familiar.
Time and technology march on. In real life a generation later, Monica Lewinsky told a grand jury that when the president called her from the Oval Office, the word Potus would appear on her caller ID. Similar acronyms have sprung up: Scotus is journalese for “Supreme Court of the U.S.,” and more recently, the first lady became known to staffers as Flotus.
Now to a word used in the memoir by Michael Waldman,Potus Clinton’s chief speechwriter. He describes the moment in his chief ’s first speech to Congress in 1993 when Clinton departed from the somewhat disorganized text. “He began to riff,” writes Waldman, “to ad-lib, to revise entire paragraphs. … [economic adviser Gene] Sperling and I were scanning our single-spaced copies of the speech. ‘He’s ad-libbing! He’s ad-libbing the State of the Union!’we shouted, and gave each other a high-five.”
Whence riff? Rife means “abundant,” probably associated with riff’s sense of “the belly”; much fashion attention is now focused on exposing the belly button, or navel, in the midriff.
But for our immediate purposes, riff originated as a ja
zz term, one meaning of which is an ostinato phrase, a musical figure, often syncopated, used throughout a composition at the same pitch. First cited in 1935, riff is a solo improvisation that, when often repeated, becomes identified with the player who can “leave that bit in” until it becomes part of a routine.
The meaning of the musical term was then extended to any rhetorical improvisation or flight of oratory, as in a New Yorker use in 1970 of “some lovely comic riffs.”
Now comes the confusion. “Putin Offers Help to Belgrade on Election Riff” was a headline in the New York Times. A simple typographical error, no? The intended word was surely rift, meaning “a split, division, fissure.” But a quick database search reveals dozens of uses of riff (perhaps influenced by tiff, “minor argument”) to mean rift.
This “is hardly an error that we could consider a hapax legomenon,” says Bryan Garner, author of the Dictionary of Modern American Usage. (That Greek phrase is used by irritated biblical exegetes to mean “only time used in a text” and often means they have to guess at the meaning.) Because the confusion of rift with riff is happening so frequently, notes the lexicographer sternly, “the modern use of riff in that sense appears to be nothing more than rank word-swapping resulting from sound association.”
Word-swapping, like spouse-swapping, is a no-no. Let us resist, holding fast to the distinction: when the president-elect swings into a familiar unity pitch, that’s a riff; when he tells a wing of his party that thought it deserved cabinet posts to get lost, that starts a rift .
On the third hand, if any politician uses a vulgarity or deliberately dresses like a slob—but in a kind of attractive way—he is said to be raffish.
The French writer Frédéric Dard was “known for his raffish prose style,” wrote Eric Pace in a Times obituary. This adjective first appeared in a letter from Jane Austen in 1801: “He is as raffish in his appearance as I would wish every disciple of Godwin to be.” William Godwin was a brilliant, unkempt Dissenter, husband of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and he struck admirers as delightfully unconventional.
Raff may come from raft, in one sense “a large collection of rubbish,” and I won’t belabor the reader with a whole raft of citations.
But see how the language meanders through time. Is the raff of raffish connected to the raff of riffraff? Yes. The riffraff are the “rabble,” the elitist’s scornful dismissal of the disreputable or seemingly worthless elements of society. “You would inforce upon us the old riffe-raffe of Sarum,” wrote the poet Milton in 1641.
Riff and raff are half-rhyming quasi-nouns from the Old French rifler, “to rifle, ransack,” and raffler, “to ravage, snatch away,” applied to things of little value.
Today’s piece is less of a snobbish improvisation for society’s elite than a raffish riff for the riffraff.
When President James Monroe borrowed books from the Library of Congress, he placed the letters “PUS” after his name to indicate “President of the United States.”
Kurt S. Maier
The Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
If you ever have occasion to write about the origins of “Potus” again, you should know that it was created, I believe, during the Johnson administration—by an AT&T repairman. The phone company man was installing direct connections on the consoles of certain members of LBJ’s staff with a red button and the repairman felt that was insufficient designation; thus came Potus, because President of the United States would not fit on the console panel.
It was soon adopted by staff when discussing White House affairs while lunching at San Souci or Paul Young, using the term “Potus” in case anybody was listening. LBJ’s secretary, Marie Fehmer, later verbalized it, and once when I had to see the President and asked what he was doing, she said: “Go right in. He’s just potusing around.”
Joseph Laitin*
Bethesda, Maryland
I recall distinctly reading the news of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. News of the president’s travels was always restricted by wartime censorship, but when he died, the newspapers reported the slow journey of the train carrying the late president from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Hyde Park. The news stories reported that the train dispatchers were notified to give priority to the presidential train, which had the special designation POTUS. I think that the acronym was used whenever President Roosevelt traveled by train, which was the way presidents traveled in those days.
William Shank
Ardsley, New York
A comment on riff-raff. In the Bible we find the phrase “a mixed multitude” in a derogatory sense (Exodus 12:28). The Hebrew original says EREFF RAFF. Not a hapax legomenon.
Eric G. Freudenstein
Riverdale, New York
Roll Out. “Early in its foreign rollout,” reported Daily Variety, a movie titled X-Men hauled in $3.4 million over an opening weekend.
A restored version of the Rolling Stones’ concert film Gimme Shelter, issued on its thirtieth anniversary, “will begin a nationwide rollout in a few markets,” according to a Reuters dispatch from Los Angeles.
The Asian Wall Street Journal spread the word throughout the Far East: “The Broken Hearts Club will have a slow U.S. rollout beginning in major cities.”
What is this movie marketing term that has so captivated the merchants of dreams in Hollywood? Where did it begin, and what did it come to mean?
“Roll out!” as every Army veteran of World War II grimly remembers, was the unwelcome barracks call that pierced the blessed stillness of the morning. Accompanied by the admonition to “grab yer socks,” the phrase has a literal meaning of “roll out of bed.” It was often followed by a sardonic “rise and shine,” a metaphoric allusion to the sun, and a few minutes later by “fall out on the company street!”—an order to assemble outside, in front of the barracks.
The transitional metaphor to its use in Hollywood probably came from the aircraft or automotive industries, as vehicles rolled out of hangars or off assembly lines. Ira Konigsberg, author of the Complete Film Dictionary, suggests a more ancient origin: “The point of the term is to suggest the growing appearance of the film much like the expansion of a carpet when it is rolled out.”
How is a rollout different from a release? “A typical Hollywood release is a wide release to a national public all at once,” says Konigsberg, “because of the reliance on national television advertising. Rollouts are for independent, foreign or more specialized Hollywood films that need to build interest by word-of-mouth or simply must earn the right to proceed to larger audiences.”
A rollout, then, like its synonym platforming, is a process of release, taking place in stages. This useful term for gradual release or step-by-step development was picked up by marketers in other fields. The magazine Martha Stewart Living led to Martha Stewart Weddings, which gave birth to Martha Stewart Baby, and Ms. Stewart told Advertising Age last month, “There probably will be a rollout from there.”
Political usage in the recent campaign, however, vitiated the nice distinction between the simultaneous general release and the calibrated rollout. “One prominent Republican strategist said that the rollout of Mr. Cheney had been disappointing,” wrote Eric Schmitt of the Times in August. “Gore’s handlers are plotting yet another rollout of their candidate,” wrote Howard Fineman in Newsweek a month later.
This sense suggests only “introduction,” and frays the carpet’s specific edge. But politics likes to seize on with-it words and fuzz up their meanings.
I would not be surprised if the term “roll out” made its way into entertainment marketing etc. through direct mail. I believe that direct marketers have used the verb phrase and the noun “roll out” for ten years or more to refer to the culmination of direct mail testing.
A careful direct marketer of any significant size will test several response rates that they generate. When one proves—often by a margin of less than 1 percent—to pull a greater response than the others, the marketer will
order most of the productive package to be rolled out, that is, sent to the full mailing list of potential customers.
Don Hill
Radio Free Europe
Prague, Czech Republic
Roll’s Roles. Todd Beamer was a passenger on the doomed Flight 93, taken over on September 11 by terrorists who intended to use the aircraft as a missile to destroy the White House or the Capitol. He had a telephone line open to an operator in Chicago, who reported hearing him recite the Lord’s Prayer before he led a group of heroic passengers to rush the suicidal hijackers. Then Beamer said: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”
President Bush recalled that moment in the eloquent peroration of a speech in Atlanta last month. “We will always remember the words of that brave man expressing the spirit of a great country,” he said. “We will no doubt face new challenges, but we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let’s roll.”
A song with that title was promptly distributed to radio disc jockeys. In a Philadelphia football stadium, a fan called “the sign man” unfurled a banner with the words “Let’s roll … out” to tumultuous applause. “The words are everywhere,” reported Britain’s Guardian. “They have become America’s favorite bittersweet and articulate bumper sticker.”
The phrase in its currently popular sense means “let’s get going; let’s move.” The original sense of get rolling had to do with the wheels of conveyances, horseless and otherwise, and dates back to the 16th century. The crapshooter’s roll ’em was introduced early in the 20th century, and the moviemakers’ command to cameramen, “roll ’em” (answered in an old joke by “anytime you’re ready, C.B.!”), was first recorded in 1939. Five years later, in his novel The Man With the Lumpy Nose, Lawrence Lariar wrote: “‘Do me a favor and go home and write it!’ McEmons stood over the reporter menacingly. ‘Get rolling!’” (I have an editor like that.) But the specific phrase let’s roll in its current meaning was first cited in the 1952 novel The Tightrope, by Stanley Jules Kauffman: “‘Let’s roll, dreamer,’ said Perry.”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 33